Giving Whrrl a Whrrl
Sunday, February 3rd, 2008I had dinner the other night with one of Pelago’s talented developers. Pelago is the company that has brought us Whrrl, a geotargeted social networking online and mobile application that enables people to share real-world adventures and discover places, events, and people through the eyes of others in their social networks.
I reached out to Jason Crawford and asked him simply, Why Pelago? Why Whrrl?
Pelago and Whrrl offer Jason the following opportunities:
- A great product in the consumer space;
- Great people with whom to work;
- Interesting technological challenges;
- Personal career growth potential;
- Pelago’s strong future business opportunities.
Meeting Jason enabled me to put a face to the company. In addition to his reasons for joining Pelago, he shared with me the fact that Whrrl hasn’t changed all that much from the original product vision. I’m interested to see if this holds over time. Fred Wilson, of Union Square Ventures, discusses the number of companies in which he invested that underwent complete or partial transformations between the time they took venture capital and the time they exited the business. The numbers suggest that Pelago may transform, but at this time it’s too early to say.
The Pelago team constantly challenges itself to improve Whrrl by adding new cool features and added functionality to benefit Whrrl’s users. The user interface is intuitive and the map allows you to see clusters of social network validated points of interest. If your phone is on the list of phones that support Whrrl, you can go to m.whrrl.com/getit to download the mobile application. The Pelago team is working on bringing us additional cities and increasing the number of phones compatible with the mobile application.
Whrrl has been in public beta since 10/23/2007, so if you haven’t tried it, it’s not too late to join the party. RSVP to the “Whrrl Focus Group – wanna free drink?” through Facebook.
Join Whrrl. Add me as a friend, or become my fan. We can even find somewhere to get coffee in Seattle.